


Slightly Singed

by tielan



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-08
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2019-03-15 11:26:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13612371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: The influx of new apprentices meant that every wizard had at least one, sometimes two new students working with them. Cilla counted herself lucky to have been assigned just the one.





	Slightly Singed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rosabelle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosabelle/gifts).



 Cilla took on an apprentice at the behest of a friend to whom she owed a favour.

_Just for a year,_ said Asher.  _Until someone else comes free to teach her._

The chief problem with ‘just for a year’ was that the child - Aurelia (honestly, who named children these days) - had hoped to be apprenticed to someone doing the offensive, aggressive magics. The kind that everyone saw the Prince wield against the Pretender last year.

Cilla wasn’t anywhere near as powerful as the Prince. That, and she didn’t have a literal legion of wizards from which to source her power.

Offensive, aggressive,  _dramatic_ magics took energy. Energy didn’t just grow on trees (well, it did, but that was another matter). And nobody ever showed the hopeful youths that turned up ‘to be trained in glorious wizardry’ the ranks upon ranks of wizards who’d collapsed where they stood as the Prince took their power to fuel his battle against the Pretender.

Oh, sure,  _technically,_ the Prince’s wizards were willing, while the Pretender’s wizards had been coerced and bound into servitude. But Cilla was a cynic at heart. Hope for the best, but don’t be surprised at the worst. She doubted that all the Prince’s wizards had understood that they were putting their lives on the line, and now that he’d rewarded the survivors, there was even less incentive to run counter to the narrative of ‘we’re the good guys’ that the public so loved.

At any rate, the influx of new apprentices meant that every wizard had at least one, sometimes two new students working with them. Cilla counted herself lucky to have been assigned just the one.

Under those conditions, the whining wasn’t much of a surprise.

“This is boring! Why aren’t we studying things like wizarding lights? My cousin did wizarding lights on his first day!”

“Your cousin had a different teacher.” Cilla said. “He probably learned wizarding lights on his first day, I learned energy flows, so we’re doing energy flows.”

“But energy flows is so boring!”

“Most wizardry is boring.” In fact, generally, a wizard hoped for boring, because boring meant that everyone lived. “If you want exciting, join the army.”

The girl rolls her eyes in the manner of the young. “My family’s First tier! The army is for Third and Fourth tiers.”

“But they don’t have to do boring energy work.” Cilla shrugged as she pulled on her light spring jacket. “So come and learn the boring stuff, or sit and sulk that it’s not the exciting stuff. I have work to do, and it needs to be done whether or not you’re learning. Just be warned that the house shuts down when I’ve been out of it for a while.”

As she reached the gate, she wondered if Aurelia would stay inside and sulk, just to be contrary. Her judgement of the child said it could go either way. The strong-willed ones tended to be the hardest to deal with at first; but the older masters said they could also be the most rewarding. While an apprentice was easier to deal with when malleable, nobody wanted full-power wizards to be malleable. That was just asking for trouble.

The footsteps dragged behind Cilla as she walked briskly through the woods, checking on her magics as they passed. It didn’t take much energy – a light touch of power here, to keep the energy draw flowing. A touch of binding for a branch that was threatening to fall when another month would drop it in the midsummer, after the birds and woodland creatures had fledged and left their burrows. The smoothing-out of an eddy that had formed near a den of foxes, making the kits whiny and the mother snappish. The severing of a tendril of power that was forming between two vines reaching out across a river ford.

“This is boring!”

“Yes,” Cilla agreed. “It is.”

Working out here involved small and quiet wizardries – looking at the way energy flowed and helping it flow more smoothly, or more cleanly. Wizardry was as much – if not more – about preservation of the small things not just protection of the big things.

Now if only they could get all the starry eyed new apprentices to believe it.

Cilla supposed she should at least try to teach the child something, even if it was quite clear the girl wasn’t going to be amenable to learning. “The world is, at its heart, boring, child. It does what it’s always done, day after day, moon after moon, season after season, by and large without any interference. It will continue to try to do what it’s done in the face of human existence so long as the conditions remain suitable.”

Behind her, the child sighed huffily. “And if the conditions don’t remain suitable?”

Cilla glanced over her shoulder. “We don’t know.”

“How can we _not know_?”

“Well, if conditions _don’t_ remain suitable, everyone will probably be dead.”

“Oh.”

Without looking over her shoulder, Cilla could still feel the child’s uncertainty, like a hawk resting on the shoulder, trying to find its balance. “That’s part of what this sort of wizardry is – keeping the conditions...suitable.”

“Suitable for what?”

“Life. Existence. Balance.” Cilla shrugged.“Keeping an eye on everything so that it runs more or less as it’s always run. It takes a delicate touch – no throwing levin-bolts around.”

“And no wizarding lights?”

“ _Eventually_ wizarding lights. But, really, why would you use a wizarding light?”

“Because it’s dark!”

“Not now, it’s not.” Cilla indicated the sunshine falling through the branches of the trees around them “And at night, there’s the moonlight, the firelight, and if you need clearer light to read by, then there are candles.”

Aurelia’s silence was thoughtful at least, even if her eventual concession was reluctant. “I suppose.”

As they joined the main track through the valley – the one that took the high ridge and led up towards the mountain pass – Aurelia’s silence continued. It was better than the child complaining, any road.

Cilla supposed she was being a little uncharitable. The child was, what? Fourteen? Perhaps fifteen? A volatile time for a young wizard, but also a difficult time for a growing girl. Still, she hadn’t asked for an apprentice, and certainly not a First Tier daughter who wanted glory and excitement.

But who was the adult here, anyway?

She paused by a rock face on the hillside, briefly touching the existing spell to check its state, and figured that here, at least, was a teachable moment. “Can you feel what I’m doing?”

“Huh?”

“You have the wizarding gift – you must be able to sense energy – can you feel the spell here?”

Aurelia frowned, her eyes narrowing as she squinted into the air. “I...maybe?”

“Don’t stare at it. Stare _through_ it. Let your eyes relax a little, blur the space, yes, like that, nearly—”

A slight gasp signals the child’s sense of the spell. “It’s...like a web?”

“It _is_ a web.” Cilla indicated the rocky shelf above them. “It’s basically holding this section of path together. The ground is unstable – has been since midwinter. But in the season when the rockface started to crumble, there were many travellers passing through. It was midwinter, and rather than have people struggle to travel through what should be an easy pass, I made a wizardry to hold it together.”

She pointed at one of the ‘tags’ - an anchoring thread that vanished into the rockface. “It’s pulling energy from the mountains itself, so I don’t have to stay here and maintain it night and day, I just have to check how it’s all holding together.”

“ _You’re_ holding all this together?”

“No, the wizardry is. And this is why energy flows are important. See how the anchor tag is thinner than my finger? In the middle of winter that was thicker than my wrist. It’s been more difficult to hold this since spring arrived – all the energy that I used to hold it in place through the winter is going back into the ground to grow the land around us. So it’ll need to be dealt with before summer, or it could crash down on an unsuspecting traveller. And then I’d probably have to tend them to health.”

“Which you’d rather not.”

“Which I’d rather not.” Cilla shrugged. “So, since you have neither knowledge nor skill as yet, I’ll anchor this for another moon, and by the time I come back to take it down and deal with the rockfall, you’ll hopefully have learned enough to be able to help. Now shush so I don’t bring the rocks down on both of us.”

It wasn’t a difficult work, just a little tiring. Cilla drove another three anchor tags into the rock face, making up in number what was no longer being provided for in power. Then she tightened the ‘net’ so the power was more diffuse over the surface of the rock, holding everything in place.

When she was done, she was exhausted, with barely the energy to stumble back along the path to a resting spot where she sat down and pulled water and honeyed nuts from her pack.

“You’re sweating.”

“Wizardry – all wizardry – takes some kind of energy to create. That’s another reason to know how energy flows, to learn how to control it and how to conserve it.”

“Oh.” Aurelia dropped into the leaf-litter and thin grass at Cilla’s feet. “And that’s what you’re going to teach me?”

“If you’re willing to learn.”

The child pursed her mouth in a thoughtful pout and scrunched up her face. It wasn’t intentional, so far as Cilla could tell. 

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay, I’ll learn.”

Cilla didn’t roll her eyes and say,  _How nice of you to decide that it’s worth your time!_ She simply shrugged. “Great. Your lessons start tomorrow.”

“And today?”

If she managed to put together a meal today, she’d count it a victory. “Today? Today, you’re helping me back home.” Cilla watched Aurelia’s face fall and felt a thread of sympathy. But sympathy wouldn't get them home and fed. “And on the way we’ll learn how to forage. Welcome to wizardry.”


End file.
